Gluten-Free Bread: Spotted Dog (and tips on baking gluten-free)

This Spotted Dog Irish bread is yeast-free and gluten-free.

If I call this new bread an Irish soda bread, traditionalists will snicker. Raisins are not traditional in an Irish soda bread, you see. If a yeast-free soda bread has raisins in it, it's called Spotted Dog. I never knew this, growing up on the white clapboard wilds of the Connecticut shore. I was blithely ignorant of this quaint canine moniker, despite a hefty streak of familial Irish blood. We ate more pierogies than Irish soda bread. So when I started baking, my Irish soda bread had raisins. Why not?

When it comes to traditions, I admit, I'm an upstart. I wiggle and chafe beneath constraint and "should" like an itchy little girl with pinching new shoes. I admire traditions. From afar. At least, in theory. In an abstract, symbolic way. The meaning and the message is more interesting to me than formula. When it comes to formula, I usually prefer to wing it.